GENDER AND REPRESENTATION IN FRENCH MEDIA SINCE 1970 Week 7: Representing the ‘Crisis of Masculinity’

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Presentation on theme: "GENDER AND REPRESENTATION IN FRENCH MEDIA SINCE 1970 Week 7: Representing the ‘Crisis of Masculinity’"— Presentation transcript:

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GENDER AND REPRESENTATION IN FRENCH MEDIA SINCE 1970 Week 7: Representing the ‘Crisis of Masculinity’

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‘Crisis Points’ in Twentieth-Century French Masculinity s? - First-wave feminism – World War I : World War II : Occupation and the Vichy State

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‘If one were to seek to make an overarching statement about the evolution of [French] male stardom from the 1930s to the 1950s one might suggest that, having helped to embody patriarchal dominance in the 1930s to the 1950s, male stars served to reveal a crisis of national virility in the wake of the collapse of 1940 before being enlisted in the service of a misogynistic reassertion of masculine power in the postwar years.’ Martin O’Shaughnessy, ‘Cinematic Stardom, Shifting Masculinities’, p.191 (extra reading) From 1930s authoritarian patriarchs to the 1940s ‘homme doux’…. RaimuJean Gabin

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-Post-war US-led modernisation: the European Recovery Program (Marshall Pan) A bout de souffle, Godard 1959

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-1960s/70s: Second-wave feminism - increased demands for equality and for sexual fulfilment. Reflected in the US in Shumway’s ‘relationship stories’. -What about France? Belmondo into the 1970s and to mid-1980s: ‘the dominant figure in the French box office’ (O’Shaughnessy, 197) And see Bard on 1980s backlash.

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‘ For Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik, comedy typically operates through a combination ‘identification and distanciation’. Neale and Krutnik, Popular Film and Television Comedy. London: Routledge, 1990, p ’[M]elodramatic characters are far more likely than comedic characters to experience the mood or “feel” of their world in ways that match viewers’ experience of it’ Deborah Thomas, Beyond Genre: Melodrama, Comedy and Romance in Hollywood Films. Moffatt: Cameron and Hollis, 2000, p. 13.